Focus On Employees: The Key To Success

Another lifetime ago, when I managed Hertz Car Sales, I made a point of hand writing little notes to our Hawaiian salesperson. Somehow, this man sold every single one of our rental cars. In fact, we were the only rental company that didn't have to ship our used vehicles back to the mainland for disposal. Although we paid him handsomely, I had a gut feeling that he liked acknowledgment-so every month, I'd send him a letter telling him what a great job he did and how much I appreciated his efforts.

Those notes of appreciation paid off when Avis made a run at him with an absolutely fantastic monetary offer. For this person, corporate appreciation meant more than the money, and he turned Avis down.

This experience confirmed once and for all my belief that if I take care of my employees, they'll not only get the job done, but be less likely to leave.

Although business spends billions of dollars to attract and retain customers, we often fail to treat our employees with the same consideration. Yet our employees are our first line of clients. How we treat them is exactly how they in turn will treat our clients!

If you have trouble connecting this philosophy to profitability, just look at the extremely tight job market, coupled with the high costs of training and turnover. Nurturing employees is not an extra: it's a bottom-line necessity.

Every year, we see business cycles, as demonstrated by the lecture topics of speakers at various conventions and conferences. In insurance, we seem to concentrate on management until sales slip; then we move to sales, and then to growth through merger and acquisition, which brings us back to management issues, then sales, then-well, you get the idea.

I think it's time for the cycle to reflect on the value of our employees. Here are 16 ways that a business can enhance its employee relationships. The first 13 provide a learning environment for another of today's key issues, technology:

1. Provide and allow Internet access for all employees. This is the communication tool of the future, equivalent in magnitude to a telephone. Yet most employers are still resistant to providing individual access. 'What if they play around on it?' they ask. 'So what!' I reply. Any time they spend on the Internet is time that they're learning, and I've yet to meet an employee that works every minute of every day.
2. Establish individual E-mail accounts. This costs virtually nothing and is a tremendous morale booster. I recently found a major association in our industry that still utilized a central E-mail address for everyone. The employees had no privacy and total inconvenience. Cybersavvy clients expect to be able to contact your people by E-mail, so establish individual accounts and post a contact page on your Web site listing the E-mail addresses of all employees.
3. Provide laptops for outside personnel. Your clients expect your outside people to be virtual offices. If they don't have laptops when they enter the client's office, it's like going to a supermarket checkout line that employs an abacus instead of an electronic register. To position yourself as a cutting-edge company, use the best tools available.
4. Use company-wide E-mail to honor employee performance. Everybody likes to be recognized and this reinforces your firm's commitment to the electronic world.
5. Design Internet scavenger hunts to promote electronic research. Once you've implemented point No. 1, this is a fun way to motivate employees to learn their way around the cyberworld.
6. Establish an electronic suggestion box. This offers the more computer-aware members of your company an opportunity to expand your technological horizons. Many of them were born into the computer generation and can offer you excellent ideas.
7. Publish an electronic version of your employee handbook. Again, this reinforces your commitment to automation and promotes paper-free, efficient operations.
8. Honor an electronic employee of the month. It may be the person who offered the best suggestion, the winner of the scavenger hunt, the person who gained the most ground in learning new technology, or the in-house automation mentor. Whatever the reason, acknowledge major efforts.
9. Publish an electronic newsletter. Make it the joint effort of all your employees by asking them to submit articles of interest electronically.
10. Investigate computer-based training programs and classes. Formal learning sessions are proving to be highly efficient and cost-effective for training and earning CE credits.
11. Put your employees in your contact-management system. As you already do with your clients (I hope), use your database to help you remember birthdays, special events, anniversaries, and other appropriate moments of contact.
12. Have employee pages on your Web site. Make each employee responsible for content about themselves, their families, their hobbies, and their interests. This gives your clients a chance to know your employees better. What's more, the employees will be attracting their friends to their pages, which means more traffic for your site.
13. Establish an employee-based community page on your Web site. Poll your employees about their community activities and memberships, and promote their various events on a community page. This will create more traffic for your site, allow your employees to bring a value-added factor to their community activities, and dramatically underscore your company's commitment to the community.
14. Take an employee to a convention. This is perhaps one of the greatest educational and bonding events that can occur between employer and employee.
15. Make a point of walking the premises every day to talk with your employees. This technique is known as MBWA-'Management by Walking Around.' Get to know your employees-their families, their values, their concerns, their hobbies. You already do this with your top clients. In fact, too many employers know more about their clients than their employees.
16. Establish an alliance benefit program. This one is for all your customers, internal and external. Create a nurturing business climate in which everybody wins by establishing a discount alliance. This encourages your employees and other customers to give your clients their business. Whether you insure a hardware store, video store, dry cleaner, or restaurant, negotiate a standard discount that can be accessed by all your other clients and employees. Everyone truly sees this as a value-added benefit-and you get the credit!

These 16 ideas are just the tip of the iceberg of ideas for improving relationships with your employees (while solidifying your organization's grasp of technology). Your employees are your most valuable customers-and it's time you let them know it!